if you're talking to me, I think mine is very relevant due to the fact that when I found that (above stuff) it was while researching PORPHYRIN NANOFIBERS! THE OTHERS ARE THE ONES THAT SCREAM SNAILS, SNAILS.....
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NOW, MAYBE THIS IS THE ALIEN THAT CLIFF SPEAKS OF....I GOT IT OFF GOOGLING IMAGES OF NANOFIBERS. WAIT TILL YOU SEE THIS ONE- A TRIP

Under a powerful microscope it looks like an alien – something out of Roswell, N.M., or “The X-Files.”

But a brand-new, tiny fiber dubbed the “alien nanofiber,” co-invented by a North Carolina State University textiles professor and a chemical engineering professor from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, has the potential to become a big deterrent to counterfeiters.

NC State’s Dr. Juan Hinestroza, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science, and Dr. Carlos Rinaldi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, created novel nanoscale fibers that can be placed inside a garment or paper document and serve as a “fingerprint” that proves the garment or document is genuine. Graduate student Carola Barrera and high school student Aldo Briano are also involved in the research.

At about 150 nanometers in diameter, the fibers are smaller than living cells and invisible to the naked eye. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; for comparison purposes, the Web site for the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a federal research and development initiative that coordinates multiagency efforts in nanoscale science, says that a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide, while a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers wide.

The tiny fibers are designed to have within them even smaller nanoparticles with an electrical, magnetic or optical “signature” that can prove a product genuine. The product would need only be scanned, or read, by a device looking for the particular signature.

For example, Hinestroza says, name-brand clothing with nanofibers can be scanned at different points in the supply chain to ensure pirated clothing doesn’t get into retail outlets or into your closet. Passports with nanofibers can be scanned to ensure their legitimacy. Ostensibly, paper money with nanofibers would help ensure fake twenties don’t get into your wallet – or the grocer’s till.

“The fibers can essentially serve as molecular bar codes,” Hinestroza says. “We can control the position, frequency and distribution of particles inside the fibers, and their signature.”

He also says that manufacturers wouldn’t need to change the ways they make things in order to include the nanofibers.

The process used to create the nanofibers is called electrospinning, a textiles manufacturing process first used in the 1930s but now being put to use to create tiny fibers.

In their electrospinning research, the scientists apply electrical charges to water-based polymer solutions containing tiny nanoparticles, including magnetic particles or quantum dots, tiny particles that, depending on their size, display colors. When enough electrical charge is applied to the solution, an unstable jet – or narrow stream of solution and nanoparticles – moving like a whip through air, is formed. The whipping motion elongates the jet while the solvent evaporates, producing a tiny fiber containing the nanoparticles.

The researchers then tested the fibers and found the fibers had magnetic properties.

Hinestroza and Rinaldi have been invited to present their nanofiber findings at a number of academic conferences in the next few months.

The research is sponsored by a National Science Foundation Nanoscale Exploratory Research grant, and by the NC State Nanotechnology Steering Committee.

Nanoscale Fiber OpticsJuly 14, 2005
One-dimensional nanoscopic structures such as nanowires are important building blocks for future miniature opto-electronic components. Swiss researchers have now developed a new method for the production of nanowires; they use lipid membranes as “molds” and obtain high yields of cadmium chloride nanowires that behave as light conductors.

“Syntheses that use molecular molds have advantages,” explains Horst Vogel, “they are simple, work under mild conditions, and deliver unique, precisely defined nanostructures”. Vogel and his team selected phospholipid membranes as molds. Phospholipids consist of a water-friendly head group and water-repellent tail groups (hydrocarbon chains). In aqueous surroundings, they line up tail to tail into double-layered membranes. If these are dried carefully, stacks of membranes are formed, in which the head groups that point toward each other are separated by nanometer-wide water films. Some types of head groups are able to selectively bind certain positively charged ions. This is the basis of the Swiss researchers’ technique. They took phospholipids with a preference for cadmium ions and produced membrane stacks with high cadmium concentrations. They then treated these with hydrochloric acid fumes. The hydrogen atoms from the hydrochloric acid forced the cadmium ions out of the binding sites and drove them into the water layer between the membrane layers. Here they combined with the negatively charged chloride ions from the acid to form tiny cadmium chloride crystals, which then continued to grow into one-dimensional wires. Why only one dimension? Beyond a certain crystal size, the lipid head groups, given a positive charge by the hydrogen atoms, begin to interact with the surfaces of the crystal which are rich in negatively charged chloride ions. The crystal thus cannot grow any further at those surfaces. Because of the special crystal structure, one of the crystal surfaces is protected from these interactions by water molecules, which are also a part of the crystal lattice. Here the crystal continues to grow. In this way, wires of up to 170 µm long and only about 100 nm in diameter are formed, which consist of a single continuous crystal.

If the hydrochloric acid vapor is augmented with hydrogen sulfide, the result is cadmium chloride nanowires that contain fluorescing cadmium sulfide nanocrystals. “If we irradiate one of these nanowires in the middle, we don’t only observe fluorescence at that one location but also at both ends,” says Vogel. “The nanowire conducts the light, just like an optical fiber.”

Why are you doing this. (trying to censor what others post?) If you do not like it nor think it relevant then why don't you skip it and not let it worry you? Help me out here Al- I'm not understanding ya.
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To others that may be interested- this is only a two-page microsoft word
document that I found on the NSF website. It shows the sol-gel and it's uses....

found this page interesting as I believe it has some type of radio/or sound frequency being applied...I never had it before, and since I've had this disease, I hear these tones periodically...so ???
Worth investigating...
Mm

al,
sorry you have been forced to waste time on post that are irrelevant to this thread topic. it's a pity that people are subjected to all the drivel that is associated with researching this disease when we could simply enjoy the entertainment you provide with your clever post. i much enjoy the poetry ,but admit that it is the definitions of such common words as potherstick and concepot that i have found to be invaluable in my search for help in coping with this horrible disease. please let me know if scotty ever beams you up. maybe you could get me a buddy pass out of this nightmare. in the mean-time, however, you might want to rethink your comments to london. she may post some stuff that you find unimportant but i have found that ,given time , her post tend to be on target as progress is made in the research being done. the problem tends to be that she is a few miles ahead of most of us so it takes a bit of time for us to make the connection. but please try to remember that even when her post are off base she is at least trying to help. it is not easy living with this disease ,and to work as hard as she does for us while dealing with it is commendable. so if you feel you get nothing out of her post i reccommend you simply skip over them. better yet, maybe you could spend more of your valuable time composing a poem that will further our quest for knowledge about Ye Olde Morgellons Disease.

The old adage is too many cooks spoil the broth.
We are swirling, drifting from one hot notion to the next. If Tam Tam is right we have Rhinospiridium, if Scwartz is right Stenotrophomonas maltophilia,, or whatever it is, London, if you are right, we have a symbiote from porphyria, and butterflies?
Now, you tell me who wants to be right?
The fibres I see are macroscopic, akin to a hair, slightly smaller, certianly not micro, let alone nano.
Yes I can skip it, but why can't we have a conversation with some salience, instead of this utter left field crap, and lets face it, we probably all fall into the tinfoil beanie category at times, but some are much more vocal, and use the forum as an advertisment for the freakish delusions they suffer.
BTW I found a band aid product containing a silver film, which softened and debrided a very deep lesion.
Any way I'll shut up, sorry London, carry on.

Superorganism
A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms. This is usually meant to be a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time. Ants are the most well known example of such a superorganism. Thermoregulation, a feature usually exhibited by individual organisms, does not occur in individuals or small groups of honeybees of the species Apis mellifera. When these bees pack together in clusters of between 5000 and 40000, the colony can thermoregulate.[3] James Lovelock, with his "Gaia Theory" has paralleled the work of Vladimir Vernadsky, who suggested the whole of the biosphere in some respects can be considered as a superorganism.

A sea sponge is a very simple type of multicellular organismThe concept of superorganism is under dispute, as many biologists maintain that in order for a social unit to be considered an organism by itself, the individuals should be in permanent physical connection to each other, and its evolution should be governed by selection to the whole society instead of individuals. While it's generally accepted that the society of eusocial animals is a unit of natural selection to at least some extent, most evolutionists claim that the individuals are still the primary units of selection.

The question remains "What is to be considered the individual?". Darwinians like Richard Dawkins suggest that the individual selected is the "Selfish Gene". Others believe it is the whole genome of an organism. E.O. Wilson has shown that with ant-colonies and other social insects it is the breeding entity of the colony that is selected, and not its individual members. This could apply to the bacterial members of a stromatolite, which, because of genetic sharing, in some way comprise a single gene pool. Gaian theorists like Lynn Margulis would argue this applies equally to the symbiogenesis of the bacterial underpinnings of the whole of the Earth.

It would appear, from computer simulations like Daisyworld that biological selection occurs at multiple levels simultaneously.

It is also argued that humans are actually a superorganism that includes microorganisms such as bacteria. It is estimated that "the human intestinal microbiota is composed of 1013 to 1014 microorganisms whose collective genome ("microbiome") contains at least 100 times as many genes as our own[...] Our microbiome has significantly enriched metabolism of glycans, amino acids, and xenobiotics; methanogenesis; and 2-methyl-D-erythritol 4-phosphate pathway–mediated biosynthesis of vitamins and isoprenoids. Thus, humans are superorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of microbial and human attributes.

al, al, al,..... you just don't get it. this disease is capable of causing brain fog, memory loss, delusions, etc....at times i think we all suffer to different degrees from this. the point , old boy, is that she is trying to and in many instances has , helped further our cause. so to be so judgemental and rude to someone who is clearly on your side makes me wonder how you treat others who don't meet your standards. if you were to see a person missing a leg ahead of you in line i bet you are the type to push past them while muttering "outta the way stumpy".or do you giggle if you see a blind person bump into things ? the attitude you display suggest as much. again, maybe you should stick to your poetry that is ever so helpful in regards to this matter.